*Murder, My Sweet Or Is It Murder My Sweet- "Dial M For Murder"-A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of the movie trailer for "Dial M For Murder".

DVD Review

Dial M For Murder, directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock, starring Ray Milland and Grace Kelly, 1956.

At one time the great mystery movie director, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, was one of my favorite directors. Not that I was ever a big fan of the whodunit, “puzzle it out”, Agatha Christie-influenced part of the genre that he tended to use in his film work. I was always more of a Raymond Chandler/ Phillip Marlowe swaggering detective “chasing after windmills” mystery guy. But visually, most of Alfred Hitchcock’s work always left me gasping for breath until the end, even in those productions like the one under review here, “Dial M For Murder", where the murder plot is laid out for you in advance and all you have to do is figure the key to the slip up that will bring the villain low.

The villain in this case is ne’er do well, man about town Ray, Milland who finds out, mistakenly, that his meal ticket trophy wife, Grace Kelly, is in love with another man. Well, to keep the gravy train going the suave Mr. Milland will do anything, literally anything, to keep his status intact. Naturally he decides, smart guy that he is, to commit the perfect murder, the murder of said beautiful wife. And the plot moves on from there, I need not tell more.

Except this. Why on this good, green earth would anyone other a stone crazy, craven maniac want to touch even one hair on the lovely Grace Kelly’s head? Whatever benighted justice falls on the head of this villainous sort is too good for them. And that is what this film really boils done to (other that the ordinary, every day propositions that “crime does not pay” and that there are no “perfect” crimes) for me. Now in this film Grace Kelly is not as fetching as in other Hitchcock vehicles like “Rear Window” and “To Catch A Thief” but I will not quibble over her stage presence on this one. I would just note here, as I have in reviewing other works in which Ms. Kelly starred, that according to the gossip her real life husband, Prince Rainer, a man not given to open displays of sentiment, wept openly at her death. And now I know why.
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***Writer's Corner- The Making Of Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe-The Collected Stories

***Writer's Corner- The Making Of Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe-The Collected Stories

Book Review

Collected Stories, Raymond Chandler, Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002

A couple of years ago when reviewing a 1940s film version of the Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, re-titled Murder My Sweet, starring Dick Powell I mentioned that I had found an old dog-eared edition of Raymond Chandler’s other writings (other than the Marlowe seven novel series) and that I wondered if there was more. Well, there was and there is, and here it is in over 1200 pages of pure Chandler from when he was a pup (an older pup since he did not start writing until later in life)up to and including some things that turned out to be sketches for the Marlowe series.

As is the nature of such all-inclusive volumes the material is uneven. Some stories are forgettable, or mere fluff. Others, as I have mentioned seem eerily very familiar except for the names of the detective and some of the characters. This book is made up of several stories from a period when Chandler was just developing his prototypical hard-boiled detective that evolved into Phillip Marlowe. The composites eventually make up The Long Goodbye, Lady in the Lake  and The Big Sleep. Fascinating in their own right but also as harbingers of things to come.

The major drawback here is not the value of the work but the ungainliness of the one volume at 1200 pages. If you are a beach chair reader, this thing will cave in your chest. On the other hand this is a treasure trove of the work of one of the second- level masters in the American literary pantheon. Enough said. Read on.

***Detective Novelist Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe Meets Leon Trotsky- “On The Quest For The New Socialist Persona”

Click On Title To Link To Leon Trotsky's "Literature And Revolution" Webpage.

Commentary

In a recent posting I reviewed detective novelist supreme Raymond Chandler’s late work (1958), “Playback”, the last in his series of Philip Marlowe stories. (See archives, September 20, 2009.) In that review I mentioned (as I have in several previous reviews of other books in Chandler’s Marlowe series) a number of positive attributes about Marlowe that I found appealing. For starters: his sense of personal honor in a modern world (the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s) that laughed at such old-fashioned notions; his gritty intrepidness in search of ‘rough’ justice in a messy world; his amazing, almost superhuman, ability to take a punch or seven for the good of the cause; and, his minimally class conscious and sometimes barely hidden contempt for the traditional social hierarchy and its police authority. In response, I received an e-mail from a reader, an ardent socialist-feminist fellow admirer of Leon Trotsky, who took me to task for my characterizations and argued that I had it all wrong both as to Marlowe’s virtues and to his so-called (her description) anti-authoritarian posture.

In passing, the reader deeply discounted those attributes where I put a plus, deplored even the idea of the possibility that a future socialist society would have room for such attributes as mentioned above and that Marlowe’s attitude toward women was ‘primitive’ (her description). While one would be hard pressed, very hard-pressed, to include Marlowe, with his very quaint but macho attitude toward women reflecting the mores of an earlier age, as a champion of women’s emancipation and he became over time a little shopworn in his sense of honor, common sense, ability to take a punch and lay off the booze the reader missed the point of my critique. Or rather she is much too dogmatic in her sense of “political correctness” as it applies to the literary front. Thus this little commentary is intended not so much to clear the air as to posit several ideas for future discussion.

I hate to invoke the name of Leon Trotsky, the intrepid Russian revolutionary, hard-working Soviet official, well-regarded political pamphleteer, and astute literary critic into this discussion but in that last role I think he had some useful things to say. Without a doubt Trotsky could have made his mark solely on the basis of his literary criticism, witness his Marxist masterpieces “Literature and Revolution” and “Literature and Art”. What makes Trotsky’s literary analysis so compelling is not whether he is right or wrong about the merits of any particular writer. In fact, many times, as in the case of the French writer Celine and some of the Russian poets, he was, I think, wrong. But rather, that he approached literary criticism from a materialist basis rooted in what history, and that essentially meant capitalist history, when he analyzed characters, the plausibility of various plots and the lessons to be drawn about “human nature” put forth by any given writer.

This is no mere genuflection on my part to a revolutionary leader whose work I hold in high regard but a recognition that capitalism has given us some much distorted concepts of what human nature is, or can be, all about. That is the core of the genius of Trotsky’s sharp pen and wit. That is why he is still very readable, for the most part, today. Unless it is question of political import, like the struggle inside Russia in the early 1920’s over the preferential establishment of a school of “proletarian culture” supported by the Soviet state that was bandies about by likes of fellow Bolsheviks Bukarin and Zinoviev, Trotsky did not spend much time diagramming any but the most general outline of the contours of what the future socialist society, its habits, manners and morals would look like. He did, and this is central in this discussion, spend a great deal of time on what capitalism had and would bequeath a socialist state. Including both vices and virtues.

Not to belabor a point this is the link between Leon Trotsky and one fictional Philip Marlowe. Trotsky accepted that personal honor had a place as a societal goal and as a matter of social hygiene. The parameters of that sense of honor naturally would be different under a social regime that was based on use value rather than the struggle for profit margins. Certainly Trotsky’s biography, particularly that last period in the 1930’s when he appeared to be tilting at windmills, demonstrates that he had a high moral code that drove him. Certainly the word intrepid is not out of place here, as well. Hardworking, hard-driving, a little bit gruff, but in search of some kind of justice. Those, my friend are the links that are the basic premise of a socialist society as it evolves out of capitalist society. As well as individual initiative, a sense of fairness, and well-placed scorn for established authority and the time-worn clichés about the limits of human nature.

Do I draw the links here too closely? Perhaps. Although Marlowe has his own version of ‘tilling at windmills’ in search of some kind of rough justice and vindication for all those knocks on the head one cannot deny that he does not challenge bourgeois society except in the most oblique way. He will not rail against General Sternwood’s oil derricks. He will not lead a crusade against the old order in his search for the elusive Velma. He is if anything very Victorian in his attitude toward women, good or bad. (Chandler’s Marlowe and Trotsky are both men of another era in their personal attitudes toward women, although Trotsky was light-years ahead on the political front). Nor is Marlowe the prototype for the ‘new socialist man’. But he remains a very appealing fictional character nevertheless. Who is your favorite fictional character, detective or otherwise? Let the discussion continue.